It’s Another Loss, an AL Record for Orioles: 21 in Row

When their pitching staff began to unravel, the Minnesota Twins knew there would be days like they had Thursday. Hopeless days. Days when the starter is unproven, the bullpen beat up.

Thursday was one of those days and should have been a perfect one for the winless Baltimore Orioles. Instead, it turned into another perfectly incredible defeat, their 21st of the season, as the Minnesota Twins won, 4-2, before 23,006 at the Metrodome.

The fact that Allan Anderson won his fifth major league game and Mark Portugal got his second major league save and Johnny Moses got the game-winning hit only added a bit of symmetry to what has happened to baseball’s most hapless team in 25 years. All three were called up from triple-A Portland this week, and Portugal didn’t arrive until the fourth inning Thursday afternoon.

But, by the time the Orioles boarded a flight for Chicago, these unlikely heroes had helped hand the Orioles the longest losing streak in American League history--21 games. More important, they gave them no reason to believe they can’t run down the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies for the longest losing streak in the modern era--23 games.

It was enough to make a manager cry.

“It’s a test,” Frank Robinson said. “It’s a real test. But we have to keep going. There’s only so much you can say. You can say things 15 times, and it doesn’t mean a lot. Each loss is tougher and tougher. The longer we’re in it, the more each individual tries to do. That’s not the way to play this game. You have to go up and try to get a hit, not try to win a game.”

By the standards of this losing streak, the Orioles, 0-21, didn’t even come close Thursday. They scored first for the third straight game, but got only six hits as their team batting average fell to an even .200.

Eddie Murray’s infield grounder got one run home in the fifth and a bases-loaded walk to Tito Landrum got another in the seventh. That was it. The Orioles left eight runners on base, five of them in scoring position. They went 1 for 9 when runners were on second or third.

The Twins also had only six hits, but they were biggies. Kent Hrbek hammered Orioles starter Mike Boddicker (0-5) for a two-run home run in the fourth, and Moses won it with a two-run double in the sixth.

When the Orioles arrived here, Hrbek was hitting .222 with no homers. But in three games, he made the Orioles his personal punching bag, going 7 for 11 with 4 homers, 2 doubles and 4 RBIs.

Hrbek and Moses did all the damage as Boddicker allowed four runs in 7 innings for a club-record 10th straight loss.

“Four runs isn’t bad,” Boddicker said. “I’m always telling the kids if they hold a team to four runs here they’ve done their job. But the runs were my runs, and I know it.”

The Orioles had baserunners in all but two innings Thursday and still scored fewer than three runs for the 14th time in the losing streak.

They were at their worst in the fourth when Murray (2 for 4) led off with a double and went to third on Anderson’s balk. But Anderson got Ken Gerhart, Larry Sheets and Carl Nichols to end the inning.

The Orioles didn’t score again until Anderson and reliever Mike Mason walked four straight hitters in the seventh. Portugal was waved in with the bases loaded and one out.

He was in the game less than two hours after his plane from Portland landed, largely because ace reliever Jeff Reardon is suffering from a sore shoulder. No matter, he struck out pinch-hitter Fred Lynn and got Cal Ripken on a fly to left. He then sailed through the eighth and ninth innings for the second save of his life.

He was no better than Anderson, who began the game with four major league victories. But he stopped the Orioles on four hits for 6 innings.

Still, the Orioles were in a 2-2 tie until the sixth. Boddicker hit lead-off man Gene Larkin with a pitch, then walked Randy Bush. Greg Gagne bunted the runners along and, after Tom Nieto struck out, Boddicker got Moses to pull a towering fly to right field. Keith Hughes, the Orioles right fielder, was playing shallow and, although the ball bounced near the base of the wall for the double, he couldn’t catch it.

“He did hit it well,” Hughes said.